


It's No Secret That A Friend Is Someone Who Lets You Help

by Coneycat



Category: British Actor RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:07:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1522256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coneycat/pseuds/Coneycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>If you were Loki, and you were really in trouble, who would you go to for help?</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's No Secret That A Friend Is Someone Who Lets You Help

**Author's Note:**

> _Originally posted on my LiveJournal--this came out of a silly thread on Tumblr. The story's not quite as silly as the initial idea. **Warning for RPF.** And also a complete disregard for mythology._

There are two kinds of people in the world.

Actually, that's bullshit. There are many different kinds of people in the world--sixteen distinct personality types if you follow Myers-Briggs, for instance, and then all the shadings and variations that result from nature and nurture to produce a range of human possibility from Mother Teresa to Benito Mussolini.

However, it is probably fair to say that, when awakened at night by banging on one's door and lengthy peals on the doorbell, there are, broadly speaking, two normal reactions: to angrily assume the person at the door is being an inconsiderate arsehole, or to immediately fear someone needs help. (There is actually a third common reaction, to flush the drugs and make one's escape out the bathroom window, but that impulse has no place in this story.)

Tom was the second kind of person, and no matter how many times he stumbled to a door to find a locked-out housemate clutching groceries or beer and leaning his elbow on the bell, or a cheerfully intoxicated friend who'd forgotten the hour, he always assumed an assault on his door meant an emergency on the other side. This actually had the happy effect of making him so relieved the bell-ringer was safe that he almost never thought to mention how inconsiderate they had been. 

On this particular occasion he had been awakened by the bell, and as he dragged on a bathrobe and headed for the stairs the peals got longer and, to his ears, more desperate. He yanked the door open and then instinctively stepped back as the ringer stumbled into the entryway, clutching the doorjamb for support. 

Tom's first impression was that he was being paid a visit by a very serious Marvel costume geek, possibly drunk, judging by the trouble he was having staying on his feet. Then the man in the doorway looked up and Tom forgot all about the horned helmet and caped costume. It appeared, at very first glance, as though the man was bearded, until Tom noticed it was a patchy, dark-rusty red beard that only reached the jawline. 

A second later, it became obvious that it wasn't a beard, it was dried blood. 

And a second after that, with a physical shock of revulsion, Tom realized the blood had come from the stranger's lips, which were zig-zagged with heavy black thread emerging from ugly punctured wounds. 

Someone had sewn the stranger's lips together. 

There are probably innumerable possible responses to being awakened by a doorbell in the middle of the night, only to find yourself the recipient of a visit by someone whose role-playing game has gone seriously, not to say sociopathically, awry. Tom's castmates, being more used to California, could have offered half a dozen, and most of them involved being on one side of the door while the visitor stayed on the other and both of them waited for emergency services to arrive. 

Tom picked a different option entirely. 

"Oh my good lord," he exclaimed, reaching out to support the stranger as he wobbled. "Let me--" and then, when it became evident the man was at the limit of his strength, "--come in here, sit down," helped him into the front room and sat him on the couch. "Um. Just… just hang on, okay? I'm going to call an ambulance. And the police." Tom made a move to look for his mobile phone, stopped as the stranger reached out and, with a grip that felt more like desperation than strength, grabbed his wrist. "No, look, I've really got to--" Tom protested, and the other man shook his head, gestured at his mouth, pointed at Tom. 

Tom felt light-headed. "Oh, no. Nonono. I can't possibly… you need…" The stranger shook his head violently, pointed at Tom again. He was becoming agitated, which could not be good for him. Tom gave in. "All right. I'll… I'll see what I can do. Just give me a second to think, okay?" The stranger let go of Tom's wrist--it felt like he was going to have a bruise there--and Tom rubbed it anxiously as he tried to figure out how to approach this problem. 

The first thing to do was remove the helmet. The one Tom wore as his character was actually fitted together in two parts, but this was all of a piece and about twice as heavy as he expected. It was hard to remove without jolting the other man's head, but Tom managed. He vaguely noticed the craftsmanship was amazing, it made even the work of Marvel's extremely gifted costume department feel a little cheap as he held it in his hands. The horns were works of art and appeared to be made of actual gold, although that was impossible because gold was too soft to be made into armor and besides… 

This was not the time to think about the helmet, so he set it down gently on the other end of the couch and focused on its wearer, forcing himself to take a closer look at the damage to his mouth. Up close it was, if possible, even uglier: lips swollen and inflamed, thread embedded in the flesh that swelled around it. Reminding himself fiercely that vomiting or bursting into tears was not an option right now, Tom decided the first thing that had to be done was to get rid of the crusted blood cementing the ends of the thread in place. Anything that could be done to reduce the swelling could only help, too. 

"I'll be right back," he promised, and bolted into the kitchen. He grabbed a clean tea towel from a drawer, opened the freezer to look for ice, paused at the thought of anyone trying to press a handful of unyielding ice cubes to a painful mess like that mouth. There was a bag of frozen peas at the back of the freezer, God knew how long they had been there, but Tom gratefully wrapped the bag in the tea towel and carried it back to his guest. 

"Okay," he said, trying to sound calm and knowledgeable, "I want you to hold this against your mouth as firmly as you can. I know it hurts, but this should help a little bit. I'll get some things together and be right back." The stranger nodded, his curiously-coloured pewter-grey eyes fixed on Tom's face with an entirely unwarranted expression of trust. Tom tried not to think about it.

He'd rented the place furnished, having no idea exactly how long he was going to be in America, and the rental company had included some safety-conscious details like a fire extinguisher in the kitchen and a first-aid kit in the upstairs bath. Tom couldn't remember what was in there but he hoped for antibiotic cream at the very least. 

It was better than that. Along with antibiotic cream that had not reached its expiry date were: individually-wrapped sterile dressings, sealed antiseptic wipes, tweezers (he winced at the thought) and, tucked down the side in their own little plastic sleeve, a pair of bandage scissors with angled blades. 

Okay. Tom ducked back into his bedroom to exchange his bathrobe for a pair of sweatpants and a Cleveland Indians t-shirt he'd picked up at the airport gift shop and, slightly more confident now that he wasn't _flapping_ , went back downstairs with the first aid kit. 

"Let's go into the kitchen, okay? The light's better in there," he suggested, helped his guest to his feet and supported him into the kitchen. In spite of what had to be a very heavy costume he weighed practically nothing, which was alarming itself. It felt as if his bones were hollow, like a bird's.

Once the other man was seated at the table, Tom found a stainless-steel mixing bowl in the cupboard under the counter, filled it with water, found a clean dishcloth in the drawer from which he'd gotten the tea towel. He recalled irrelevantly that there was a bottle of Scotch in the cupboard to the right of the sink, decided they might both need a belt later but it would not do him any good right now, took a deep breath and returned to his guest. He set down the bowl of water with the dishcloth floating in it and gathered his nerve. 

"The first thing we need to do," he explained, pitching his voice as reassuringly as was possible considering he was nearly as terrified as the other man had to be, "is clean off the worst of that blood. Then I'm going to have to cut the stitches. I'll be as gentle as I can, okay?" The other man nodded, still, in spite of everything, looking alarmingly confident in Tom's ability to help him. 

Tom had to admit, he took more pains than was strictly necessary as he cleaned the other man's face. The important bits were the stitches themselves, ensuring no dried blood was sticking the thread in place more than could be helped, but he spent a moment on general cleanup, partly stalling and partly because the other man just looked so pitiful. 

He'd expected the next bit to be bad. It was actually much worse than that: the scissors had a relatively blunt tip so he had to push the blade under each stitch, which pulled painfully. At one point Tom considered going to look for a pair of manicure scissors he was sure were in the bathroom cabinet, then thought about how sharp their points were and decided against it. And of course, the stitches could not simply be cut from the outside, Tom had to reach inside the cringing lips and cut the thread in there as well. The thread was heavy and ridiculously tough, almost as though it had been waxed. What it had felt like going through just did not bear thinking about. Tom couldn't help thinking about it anyway. 

The other man did his best to be stoic but after a while he couldn't stop himself from whimpering. Tom, sweating freely, had to stop several times to wipe his own teary eyes so he could see what he was doing. About half the stitches were cut when the other man reached the limit of his endurance and flinched back from the scissors. 

"I'm really sorry," Tom said, trying and failing not to sound as desperate as he felt, "but you have to keep still. I know this has to hurt like hell, but you've just got to try." The two of them looked at each other for a second, then Tom said, "Is it okay if I put my hand under your chin, just--?" he demonstrated, cradling the injured man's jaw in his left hand to steady him. The man reached up and grabbed Tom's wrist, but he didn't try to push the hand away. The contact seemed to calm him and, after a couple of breaths on both sides, Tom went back to his task. 

When the last stitch was cut the other man inhaled as if he'd not taken a free breath since he was assaulted--which was entirely possible. Tom put down the scissors and reached for the tweezers. 

"You… you might want to do this yourself," he suggested diffidently, praying the answer would be yes. He didn’t know whether to swear or cry when the injured man shook his head and said indistinctly, 

"No. You must." 

_Must?_

Well, there was little point in wasting time arguing. Tom nodded, smiled as convincingly as he could, and went to work pulling the thread out as gently as possible. 

It was, of course, much worse than cutting the stitches in the first place. The upper lip was bad, the lower was worse, and the only thing that kept Tom from being sick in the sink was the knowledge it was far worse to be the man on the other end. He could hear himself making hopelessly would-be comforting noises, sort of a deranged little croon, as he worked. The stranger's pewter eyes never closed, never left his face, and whatever he saw there seemed to help. 

Finally, the task was done. The tweezers fell from fingers that suddenly wouldn't stop trembling, and he handed the towel-wrapped bag of peas back to his companion. 

"I'm just going to wash my hands, and then we'll clean you up again and put something on those… on your… Okay?" Receiving a nod, Tom picked up the bowl of gruesome water and carried it to the sink, where he did a Lady Macbeth with dish soap and hot water for what felt like not nearly long enough. 

When he turned back to the kitchen table, the stranger had put down the frozen-pea compress and was pressing his fingers to one of the wounds on his upper lip. Tom opened his mouth, stupidly, to remind him that might cause infection. As if there was anything worse that could be done to him.

The stranger took his fingers away from his lip. 

The wound was gone. 

Tom took a half-step backward, fetched up against the counter, and leaned on it. In a voice rendered almost calm by shock he asked, "Who are you?"

"You know who I am," the other man replied, as he healed the next puncture, leaving only a little pale scar in its place. He glanced at Tom with the wincing ghost of a knowing smile. 

Tom looked at the remarkably well-made and beautiful green costume and scuffed but still-impressive armor. He thought about the helmet, with its gracefully curving golden horns. 

Still in that matter-of-fact, shocked voice, Tom replied, "That's impossible." The visitor healed the final puncture in his top lip and went on to the lower. "You can't be," Tom argued helplessly. "You're a, a figure of legend."

"So is your Admiral Nelson, and yet he was a man," said his guest, and Tom supposed, all things considered, it was some comfort that he'd referenced Nelson rather than, say, Hitler. 

"If you can heal yourself, why did you come to me?" he ventured, then wondered if that was a mistake when his guest's--all right, when _Loki's_ \--expression darkened. 

"I can _heal_ myself," the trickster god said bitterly. "There was no enchantment against me _healing_ myself. The enchantment was that I could not _free_ myself, that I must seek out someone who would help me, of their own free will and without coercion." The gray eyes went to Tom's and, in spite of his state of shock, Tom got it immediately.

"You mean you couldn't find anyone else who would?" The punishment was bad enough: whatever Loki had done this time, Tom was too much a product of his own civilization and upbringing to consider it anything but reprehensible. But to then force him to silently beg for help and _refuse_ it? "That's… that's awful," he said, inadequately. 

"It was considered just," Loki mumbled, but he seemed slightly consoled by the sympathy. 

"Not where I'm from, it's not," Tom retorted, turning to rinse the mixing bowl and refill it. "I still don't understand…"

"I sought out my old comrades, my _brother_ , those I have helped in the past," Loki said, his voice trembling, and Tom remembered that in the legends, Loki was not solely a figure of malevolence. "Not one of them would aid me. I was turned away everywhere." Tom found another clean dishcloth and brought it and the bowl of clean water back to the table. Loki began wiping the fresh blood from his face, eyes filling with tears of remembered pain and humiliation and… and grief, it looked like, as he spoke. "And then I remembered you, you who understand me like no other, and I knew you would help me."

Tom resolutely did not imagine Loki trolling comic book discussion forums for links to interviews by the actor playing him in the movies, because he knew if he did he would go into genuine hysterics and he did not want to imagine what Loki might do to snap him out of it. 

And besides, he'd felt sorry enough for Loki when the character was simply a construct in his own head. To have him sitting at the kitchen table looking even more lost and desolate than Tom had ever imagined was just beyond him. He was so _small_. Tom was quite accustomed to being the tallest guy in the room, as long as Hemsworth wasn't around, there was something to that stereotype about actors being short. But he was almost never, and in the past couple of years definitely never, the _biggest_. He'd dropped some weight to play Loki lean and hungry and a contrast to the muscular superheroes around him, but the realities of stunt training and the practicalities of just _walking around_ in a forty-pound costume meant there was only so far he could go in terms of turning himself into a stick figure. 

Apparently Loki must use magic to support his wardrobe, or something, because in person the God of Mischief was a couple of inches shorter than Tom, had tiny bones, and was really just alarmingly thin. His face was high-cheekboned and pointy with giant eyes, like Tom always imagined a fairy or an elf's would be. His black hair was matted and, on closer inspection, his clothing was sour with wear. His mouth had not looked like a recent injury, either.

"How long have you been in this condition?" Tom asked. 

"It took me longer than I expected to find you," Loki replied, words muffled by the dishcloth. His eyes were reproachful. 

"I'm sorry," Tom said gently, "I've been moving around a lot lately, and I didn't know anyone was looking for me." A thought struck him, hard. "My God, you must be hungry. You must be _thirsty_." The Scotch in the cupboard presented itself to mind, but the last thing he needed right now was for his already-distraught guest to add alcohol on top of hunger and exhaustion. He gave him a glass of water instead, with a bendy straw in paper he'd added to a bag of takeout before he realized there was already one in there. Loki looked at the straw like he had no idea what it was, so Tom took it out of its little paper wrapper and put it in the glass for him. Loki's mouth looked almost normal but memory of the horror it had been in the recent past made Tom want to make things as easy on him as possible. Loki thanked him--thanks were a good sign, all things considered--and drank about half the water. 

And by this time it was quarter after three in the morning and nobody could possibly expect Tom to put Loki out into the night all alone, not in his current condition and probably not any other. He knew in his head that the trickster god was at least nine hundred years his senior but there was no getting around it, Tom felt responsible for him. He dumped the second bowl of not-quite-as-gruesome water down the kitchen sink and announced, 

"You obviously can't leave tonight, so I'll make up the bed in the spare room for you. Would you like to have a shower?" Loki looked blank and Tom amended, "A bath? I'll get you some clean clothes and a towel and you can, can decide what to do in the morning. Are you sure you're not hungry?"

It transpired Loki preferred a bath to food, and expressed gratitude at the possibility of clean clothes and a bed for the night. God of Lies he might be, but unless he was also a better actor than Ken Branagh Tom was pretty sure the gratitude was real, which probably meant it was safe for Tom himself to go to sleep tonight. 

So he rooted around in a pile of clean laundry, found a pair of cotton pajama pants and a green t-shirt--the green wasn't deliberate, it was just what came to hand--took Loki into the bathroom, gave him a towel and demonstrated the operation of the shower, and left him to it. He unearthed the spare bed from under a pile of his own home-from-location luggage and laundry and assorted crap, decided to change the sheets, did so, and put the bed back together. 

Responded to a wail from the bathroom, rescued Loki from the shower curtain, turned off the water, gave him a dry towel, waited for him to get dressed, escorted him to the spare room, went back to the bathroom, hung the trickster's own drenched clothing over the towel rack and did his best to clear up the water all over the floor. 

Went back to check on Loki, found him unable to figure out how the bedside lamp worked, went in to turn it off for him. 

"I'll leave the light on in the hall," he offered. "In case you need to get up for anything." It was possible Loki might need to go to the bathroom before morning, but there was a look in his eyes that told Tom he was not ready to be left alone in the dark right now, friendly presence asleep down the hall or not. 

"Thank you," Loki said in a small voice. As Tom leaned over to switch off the lamp Loki, in what was becoming a familiar gesture, caught him by the wrist again. He looked startled by his own action and immediately let go. He still had that look in his eyes. Without comment, Tom switched off the lamp and then sat down on the edge of the bed, where he remained, quietly, until Loki's breathing evened out in sleep. Then he got up as gently as possible and left the room. 

Paused out in the hall, reflecting that he was not only hosting the God of Mischief as a houseguest, but had apparently just _tucked him in._

Tom sighed, went down to the kitchen, and got the bottle of Scotch out of the cupboard. 

And a big glass.


End file.
